Visit to Angkor

Long time no post! When I'm busy, there's no time to sit and write a blog entry, when I'm not, there's not much to blog about. This pic was taken atop Phnom Bakheng, one of my favorite places at the Angkor ruins. It was a very rainy day, but it stopped pouring right as I arrived at the site. For the next 20 minutes everything appeared misty and magical, and there were clouds of dragon flies hovering above the central shrine. The weather also had the beneficial effect of scaring away a lot of the tourists and the hawkers that day. Phnom means hill, and the fortified temple complex is a step pyramid built atop a natural rise. It actually reminded me a lot of Mesoamerican architecture in this respect. It was also meant to evoke the mythical Mt. Meru (a sort of Hindu/Buddhist Mt. Olympus).

There are many, many temples, gates, bridges, libraries and palaces at Angkor. On this first trip Jenny and I really only grazed the surface. Some of my favorite things were actually the low-relief murals of mythology and historical battles lining the walls of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. Of course, the way the jungle has taken over many of the sights was also pretty cool.

There are also a few factors that make Ankgor somewhat less magical than it should be. Mainly, there are a lot of vendors in and around the ruins, far worse than I experienced in Mexico. I remember that Teotihuacan was bad in the middle of the day, but you could at least escape to a more secluded area of the site. At Angkor it seems, the more remote, lesser temples have hawkers that are all the more desperate for tourist dollars, precisely because their location isn't as prime. There are a lot of poor people in Cambodia, and in a way you can't blame them for trying to make money however they can. But still, if I'm sitting in your restaurant, do you really need to send your kids to my table to hawk postcards as I'm trying to eat? I found it pretty stressful to deal with the dozens of people over the course of each day who were trying to hustle us for money. It often left me too guarded and on-edge to find any wonder in what I was seeing. Whenever we escaped the annoying vendors though, it was a truly amazing place.